A Microwave Modeling Oxymoron?: Low-Frequency Measurements for Microwave Device Modeling

Abstract

For a number of decades, the modeling of microwave transistors relied on specific well-known characterization methods. Those methods include S-parameters measurement through vector network analyzers (VNAs) ranging from the lower end of the RF spectrum to the millimeter-wave (mm-wave) region and load pull measurements of transistors used for the design of power amplifiers (PAs). Later, the availability of more powerful computer-aided design (CAD) software enabled the need for models of active microwave devices, thus driving a huge amount of research activity on microwave transistor modeling. Simultaneously, new transistor technologies were invented, combining working concepts such as heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs), metal semiconductor field effect transistors (MESFETs) or high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) and new materials such as gallium arsenide (GaAs), gallium nitride (GaN), indium phosphide (InP), and silicon germanium (SiGe), to cite only the main ones.